A posting from Michael Kay announces the release of an experimental implementation of the Saxon XSLT Processor supporting many of the new features in the new W3C XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 working drafts. The Saxon package is "a collection of tools for processing XML documents, including (a) an XSLT processor; (b) a Java library, which supports a similar processing model to XSL but allows full programming capability, which you need if you want to perform complex processing; (c) a slightly improved version of the Ælfred parser from Microstar. Saxon implements the XSLT 1.0 recommendation, including XPath 1.0, in its entirety; version 7.0 also implements many features defined in the XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 working drafts, in particular: (1) Support for multiple output files using xsl:result-document; (2) Full processing capability on temporary trees, previously known as result tree fragments; (3) Support for sequences of nodes and simple values; (4) Support for the new XPath expressions if, for, some and every; (5) Support for named collating sequences; (6) Many new functions and operators. The most notable omission in version 7.0 is support for XML Schema data typing: the data types currently supported are boolean, string, decimal, integer, float, and double."

Note from Michael Kay: "[Saxon version 7.0 is] intended to allow familiarisation with the new features, and to gain feedback. Neither the specification nor the code can be considered stable, so please continue to use Saxon 6.5 for production use..."